In today’s post, I’d like to talk about our expectations for our dogs. We train a lot of service dogs, but this advice applies to any dog. Many people say that they want their dog to watch over them or their kids. When I ask them what this specifically means, they say that they want …

It’s Saturday evening. I’m dirty, sore, tired—and fulfilled! That’s unusual. If you know me at all, you know that I despise manual labor. I always joke that I’m the hardest working lazy man you’ll ever meet. I don’t mind getting a leash in my hand and working with dogs, but other manual tasks like mowing …

Today, I spent some time in my backyard with my dog Chocolate Chip and a Belgian Malamute who’s staying at my house to be trained as a personal protection dog. Needless to say, there was a lot of growling involved. So I thought I’d take a few minutes to talk about growling and what it …

Lately I’ve been working a lot with Sword, a protection dog in training. Protection dogs are a big investment, usually around $20,000 to $50,000. Today we were working on Sword’s sit command. He often understands this command to mean sitting at someone’s side, but right now I want to train him to sit in front …

In this post, I’m going to tell you something that will possibly make you angry. It tends to have that effect on people, whether I say it like a jerk or as sweetly as I can. I think that people react in this way because they have an emotional response to things that go against …

Right now I’m in Hawaii working with a client, and I wanted to write a post about what I call the translation period. This is something that’s on my mind today because I’m working with a client here who has a new dog. The dog came to them trained, but I need to work with …

Today’s article is going to break a few hearts. Every time I talk about the topic I’m about the delve into I feel awful, because I’m destroying someone’s idea about their dog. But I think that it’s crucial for people to understand. The myth I’m going to bust today is the idea that your dogs …

Today I want to make a distinction between intelligence and drive. These are two very different concepts, but they are often confused with each other to a certain degree. People often have incorrect expectations for their dogs based on this misunderstanding. About eight years ago I was invited to do a demonstration with my dog, …